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Japan ordered to stop Antarctic ‘scientific’ whaling

“AN UNEXPECTED outcome and one that has many people around here very happy,” said Steve Nicol of the Australian government’s Antarctic Division. “This vindicates what scientists have been saying for years,” said Phillip Clapham of the US National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, Washington.

It’s fair to say whale researchers were buoyant this week after the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Japan to stop whaling in the Antarctic. The ICJ ruled that such whaling was not for scientific purposes as Japan had claimed, so was not legal under the international convention regulating whaling.

Australia had taken Japan to the ICJ on precisely this point. Commercial whaling was banned in 1986 by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), but Japan has always insisted its hunts are not commercial. It says they are designed to carry out scientific research on whale stocks, for which the convention allows the killing of whales. In court it argued that the ICJ could no more rule on whether its hunt was science “than it could decide what is or is not ‘Art’“.

But the judges cited evidence – supported by Japan’s own expert witness – that catch sizes were not set to meet scientific objectives. ICJ president Peter Tomka, to laughter in court, said a desire for certain catch sizes seemed to have determined the scientific plan, “rather than the other way around”. At one point the catch size doubled even though scientific goals were unchanged; another time, the goals did not change even though catches were smaller than expected. This suggests, said the judges, that catches were not statistically valid samples set to meet scientific goals.

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The whaling programme since 2005 has yielded only two peer-reviewed papers, and neither was about the structure, feeding and competition of minke, fin and humpback whale populations, which were meant to be the focus of study. Over the same period, some 3600 minke whales were killed. “The scientific output to date appears limited,” the judges remarked.

Japan is “deeply disappointed” but says it will abide by the judgment. The fate of whales – and the whaling convention – may depend on what it does next. At the hearings, Japanese officials suggested that Japan might leave the IWC, which could weaken global protection for whales.